And yet my guess is that the atheism debate is going to be a sideshow. The cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God, it’s going end up challenging faith in the Bible. [Emphasis added]

He continues:

First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.

In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.

In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That’s bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation. Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day. I’m not qualified to take sides, believe me. I’m just trying to anticipate which way the debate is headed. We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’s going to have big cultural effects.

As an aside, I feel that the very existence (I feel that it does in fact exist) of morality, ethics, “right vs. wrong,” “good vs. evil;” just the fact that we have these concepts argues against atheism. No it does not argue in favor of a Christian worldview per se, but if we happen to exist by coincidence, why does anything matter at all? And if nothing matters, things like “good” and “bad” stop making sense.

What caught my attention is the fact that you can now “order” your own DNA to be unlocked. 23andMe, a new internet startup based in Mountain View, California, has started providing services to uncover your genome. In a nutshell, after you send them your spit, they extract your DNA and upload its information into a database, you can browse your genome to see what your particular DNA means for you.

While some of the information can be trivial - for example, whether you can digest milk or not, or are pre-disposed to like brussels sprouts and other bitter vegetables - you can also see if you’re likely to have a heart attack or develop Alzheimer’s. Most interesting to me, however, is the ability to compare your DNA to that of humans all over the planet and see what DNA bits you share with others, ultimately tracing your ancestry to many generations ago.

The reason I thought this topic was appropriate here is because puts the issue of choice in the spotlight: do we have a choice about anything, or are we merely slaves to our DNA? My position on this question has been that the choices we make occur within context, and our bodies (whether its our DNA or the chemical makeup of our brain at this very moment) are part of this context. So is the environment in which we find ourselves, and a host of other things. In short, everything that makes up what we refer to as “reality.” Fundamentally, however, I believe that we have a choice, that is the ability to take action even if it means “feeling bad” in the short term (or even long).

For example, I am addicted to cigarettes. I love them. You can give me all the reasons it’s bad to smoke, and I’d agree; I just choose to keep smoking. The danger I see in being able to peer into your genetic makeup is that it will give people the illusion that they have no choice: “I can’t stop smoking because I’m genetically predisposed to addiction.” While I concede that you may be genetically predisposed to addiction, or anything else, I still feel that you have choice. My fear is that people will start using their DNA as an excuse to evade responsibility.

Incidentally, I see our ability of choice as a primary clue that we are more than the sum of our body parts; that we in fact possess a “soul.” From an evolutionary perspective, it makes no sense to me to have the ability to do things like suicide, or even less severe actions that ultimately don’t aid your survival. Why can we go against our nature? Or is that just part of human nature?

While I’m on the topic of evolution: it occured to me some time ago that - if I remember my Biology classes correctly - genetic mutation is one of the fundamental processes by which evolution occurs. How did genes and DNA come about to begin with; and why do molecular structures all of a sudden start displaying the ability to reproduce themselves (see the post “Inorganic Life in Space”).

Given all that, I would still instantly drop the $1000 23andMe charges. We have long ago abandoned living in harmony with nature and instead chosen to eat of the tree of knowledge; there’s no stopping it now.

• Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything
• Is this the fabric of the universe?

Update: Here’s the actual article in which A. Garrett Lisi published his theory: “An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything.” Check out the abstract:

“All fields of the standard model and gravity are unified as an E8 principal bundle connection. A non-compact real form of the E8 Lie algebra has G2 and F4 subalgebras which break down to strong su(3), electroweak su(2) x u(1), gravitational so(3,1), the frame-Higgs, and three generations of fermions related by triality. The interactions and dynamics of these 1-form and Grassmann valued parts of an E8 superconnection are described by the curvature and action over a four dimensional base manifold.”

My thoughts exactly

First, Chemistry tells us that everything tangible is made up of atoms. Atoms appear to be made up of subatomic particles that through investigation are becoming increasingly massless. It’s as if there is no substance to what we call ‘real’, merely energy organized in a predictable way, with predictable interactions with other energy, but in the deepest analysis, there is no “THING” (substantial matter) there. WEIRD!

Second, astrophysics is telling us that the universe as we know it started as an infinitely small particle (smaller than an atom). This particle had to contain not only all the energy-matter in the universe, but the laws that would govern that energy as well. But we do not know how that particle got there. WEIRDER!

Then I wonder.. if we are the manifestation of this seed, a product of universal energy evolution, a predictable product of the laws of the universe and evolution of life.. how are we able to be aware of ourselves? What gives us the ability to look at ourselves as the evolution of this system that we are in? It’s as if part of us (consciousness, imagination…) is beyond the containment of reality because if it wasnt on the outside, how could we look at the whole?

Maybe a drastically over-simplified analogy will explain my question.. Imagine, reality is like a house. We live in this house, and evolved as beings from the interaction of elements within this house. As intelligent beings, we have explored the house, discovered fundamental properties of the house, learned to design our own world within the house to meet our basic needs. Yet somehow, even though the boundaries of the house are the boundaries of reality itself, we can attain a perspective that is outside the house! We step outside everytime we talk of reality as something we can know, something that can be present in its entirety, in our minds..

it’s weird! its like we are here, immanent products of reality. yet we are also transcendent, beyond the confines of reality.. how?

“The Fallacy of the Enlightenment is the glib assumption that there is only one limit to what human beings can know – reality itself. This view says we can find out more and more until eventually there is nothing more to discover. It holds that human reason and science can, in principle, unmask the whole of reality.

“In his 1781 “Critique of Pure Reason,” Kant showed that this premise is false. In fact, he argued, there is a much greater limit to what human beings can know. Kant showed that human knowledge is constrained not merely by the unlimited magnitude of reality but also by a limited sensory apparatus of perception.”

The article is definitely worth the read and reflection.  You can fine the article on Christian Science Monitor: “What atheists Kant refute.”

” We are spirits loose in the realm of ‘consciousness’.. active in a plane of sensory existence, a dimension of being created thru the biological and chemical evolution of feeling and understanding.  We exist as a flow of experienced sensation within time-space, a perceived moment of interaction between an inner world and an outer world, the unison of body, mind, & spirit…  spirit existence within a human body is unlike any other spirit form on earth, it seems to have infinite potential through the power of intention, far beyond the scope of other earthly life forms who seem bound to a set of behaviors evolved to support the cycle of life. human life, however, is able to shape reality into some imagined form of belief, a subconscious paradigm, a collective dream, a dream which manifests behavior and ‘personality’. We are nodes on the web of conscious existence. “

Some questions that naturally arise are: what is life? What is consciousness, and what kind of systems does it require (if any at all)? Can there be consciousness on atomic and sub-atomic levels?

Here’s the abstract of the article, “From plasma crystals and helical structures towards inorganic living matter”, published in the New Journal of Physics:

“Complex plasmas may naturally self-organize themselves into stable interacting helical structures that exhibit features normally attributed to organic living matter. The self-organization is based on non-trivial physical mechanisms of plasma interactions involving over-screening of plasma polarization. As a result, each helical string composed of solid microparticles is topologically and dynamically controlled by plasma fluxes leading to particle charging and over-screening, the latter providing attraction even among helical strings of the same charge sign. These interacting complex structures exhibit thermodynamic and evolutionary features thought to be peculiar only to living matter such as bifurcations that serve as ‘memory marks’, self-duplication, metabolic rates in a thermodynamically open system, and non-Hamiltonian dynamics. We examine the salient features of this new complex ’state of soft matter’ in light of the autonomy, evolution, progenity and autopoiesis principles used to define life. It is concluded that complex self-organized plasma structures exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter that may exist in space provided certain conditions allow them to evolve naturally.”

You can also read an article about this on physorg.com: “‘It might be life Jim…’, physicists discover inorganic dust with life-like qualities.”